Sunday, January 03, 2016

How diversity and inclusiveness become repressive and totalitarian

In the December 14 issue of the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last reflects
on the remarkable success of the student protests at universities
around the country. He catalogues the capitulations. Fifteen students
occupy Princeton president's office for a few hours, and their demands
are taken with the upmost seriousness, including the call to expunge
Woodrow Wilson's name. Faced with protestors, Brown's president commits
$100 million to create “a just and inclusive campus.” A dean resigns at
Claremont McKenna. Professors at Yale are cursed and denounced. And, of
course, Mizzou President Tim Wolfe is forced out.

In these and
other instances, one is struck by how quickly and thoroughly university
leaders have capitulated. The institutions don't defend themselves. The
grown-ups in charge offer no resistance. Quite the contrary, they
accommodate and apologize. Last points out that last year we saw a
preview of this spirit of capitulation. University of Virginia was
rocked by a Rolling Stone story about a fraternity gang rape. It turned
out to be false, but university administrators continued to recommit
themselves to the cause. The same goes for the notorious mattress girl
at Columbia who claimed to have been raped by a fellow student. Even
though he was exonerated, Columbia continued to honor her protest.

Or
there's the case of the back electrical tape covering faces of black
professors at Harvard Law School, an incident that caused much
soul-searching, but which evidence suggest may have been a hoax
perpetrated by student activists. There's precedent. At Oberlin two
white student radicals circulated fliers with swastikas and demeaning
comments about Martin Luther King. The ruse was exposed. Nevertheless,
administrators issued statements emphasizing their commitments to racial
justice, inclusion, etc.

What is going on? Why are university
administrators so willing to cave to quickly and so thoroughly, even
when it turns out that supposed crises are manufactured or exaggerated?

Last argues that the reason concerns power. Aggrieved students,
especially aggrieved students from officially designated minorities,
seem to have more power than university administrators. And with each
capitulation, resignation, and earnest apology, that sense of power
grows. That's right, and it raises the question of the source of
administrative weakness and minority student power.

The answer
comes from our larger political culture. “Diversity” is one of the
pillars supporting the legitimacy of our ruling class. (The other is
technocratic competence or “merit.”) In our present situation, the
President of Yale justifies his power by appealing to his competence—and
to his commitment to “diversity.” The same goes for CEOs of major
corporations, heads of major philanthropies, and most political leaders.
“Diversity” serves to block accusations that the control of power (and
wealth) is an inside game that favors insiders. No, says the ideology of
“inclusion,” we hold power, yes, but we do so with a self-sacrificial
commitment to use it to empower others.

Moreover, “diversity” is
also a bludgeon with which to beat up on any challengers to today's
elite. Republicans? They're the “white party,” which is another way of
saying a party of prejudiced, racist xenophobes. To lack “diversity”
disqualifies one automatically. This is a very handy tool with which to
dismiss competition for power, especially when you can define
“diversity” as you wish, which is what our establishment does. Minority
students, especially black students, are aware (or at least half-aware)
that the power of the ruling class depends upon THEIR cooperation.
Because of our history of slavery and segregation, our ruling class
needs black Americans so that it can certify itself as “diverse.” As a
consequence, minority students—again, especially black students—are in a
position to collect enormous rents.
Consider this scenario.
Twenty white male Yale students surround a black faculty member, cursing
and taunting. If Yale's president expelled them, our power elite would
applaud. Now, consider what actually happened at Yale, which was the
opposite, students of color cursing and berating a white professor. Had
Yale's president expelled them, he would have triggered an institutional
crisis that in all likelihood would have cost him his job.

Given
the importance of “diversity” for the legitimacy of our ruling class, I
can't imagine significant resistance to student demands. What's $100
million when running America is at stake? I'm quite sure nobody
important is going to object to scrubbing Woodrow Wilson's name from
Princeton's campus, if that what's necessary to re-secure the
complaisant cooperation of black students in Princeton's project of
being a model of “diversity.” This won't come about because the
grown-ups at Princeton and elsewhere are feckless. It's because they
know what's at stake—their own legitimacy.

The stakes are
increased exponentially by the fact that our ruling class is positioning
itself to stand astride the entire world. The One Percent is
reconfiguring itself as the global establishment. To so so—and to nail
down legitimacy—our super-rich and super-powerful must demonstrate their
multicultural bona fides. They need to have an ideological profile that
promotes “diversity,” scaling up our national project into an
international one. Americans aren't going to run the world. No, our
ruling class will be “inclusive” and “empowering.” (Obama's early
foreign policy rhetoric sounded exactly these notes, and to some extent
still does, though the fact that some don't want to be “included” has
dampened things a bit.)

Populism Left and Right, here and in
Europe, senses that multiculturalism serves as an ideology to justify
the transformation of American, French, or German elites into global
elites. And they're rebelling, rightly to my mind. Ordinary people
rightly see that they'll be sold out if that's what needed to promote
whatever form of global “diversity” the One Percent sees as necessary to
buttress its right to rule.

2 comments:

Oncet, those with authority capitulated to the demands of the radicals and, thus, conditioned them to continue their radicalism in an ever expanding area of life and, eventually they completed their long march through the institutions.

As regards to the Church it capitulated to the radicals demanding communion in the hand and such capitulation conditioned them to continue their radicalism and demands for other unorthodox change - and then those radicals were raised to Bishoprics and Caridinilate.

"Diversity" and "multi-culturalism" would be harmless stupidities were it not for the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. Without that hellspawn piece of legislation, Martin Luther King Jr would be burbling his malarkey harmlessly before a black congregation, when not bedding down with one of the dusky blossoms of the choir. Jesse Jackson would be running a protection racket on the south side of Chicago -- not quite harmless, I suppose -- and Sally Belfrage would be a harmless spinster writing "Hints from Heloise"-style syndicated columns and dreaming of being Mrs Bobby Kennedy. Thus the very fatuousness and insipidity of their natures would have protected most of us from the evil of which such natures are capable, given a simple twist of fate.